Offer users a personalised view enabling them to follow datasets, groups and users relevant to their interests

Would you like your data catalogue to be included in PublicData.eu?

If you would like your official EU data catalogue or open data portal to be added to PublicData.eu, please contact us with the details of your data portal. Our team will work with you to integrate the metadata of your datasets and make these appear on PublicData.eu. Please note that we will always link back to the datasets on your portal.

There are countless city level initiatives across Europe as well – from Helsinki to Munich, Paris to Zaragoza. As many open data city as exist now, still even more initiatives exist in the pipeline with plans to launch in the next 6 to 12 months. This deluge of open, freely reusable data creates significant social and economic opportunities for European citizens.

New digital services enable users to have information they are interested in delivered directly to them via email, web or mobile updates. For example, in the UK, TheyWorkForYou lets users know every time their elected representative speaks or when a topic of interest to them is discussed in the British Parliament. Large complex datasets can be broken down and presented in more intuitive ways. For example the WhereDoesMyMoneyGo project allows users to see where their taxes go using simple and intuitive data visualisation technologies in order to demystify a complex subject.

In addition to increasing transparency and improving public service delivery, open data creates opportunities for businesses to build new kinds of commercial services around this new data. This is because the data is published in a way which makes it legally and technically easy for anyone to reuse for any purpose. A recent study estimates the market based on European public sector information could be worth as much as €27 billion (see the 2006 MEPSIR study).

In order to unlock the potential of digital public sector information, developers and other prospective users must be able to find datasets they are interested in reusing. PublicData.eu will provide a single point of access to open, freely reusable datasets from numerous national, regional and local public bodies throughout Europe.

Information about European public datasets is currently scattered across many different data catalogues, portals and websites in many different languages, implemented using many different technologies. The kinds of information stored about public datasets may vary from country to country, and from registry to registry. PublicData.eu will harvest and federate this information to enable users to search, query, process, cache and perform other automated tasks on the data from a single place. This helps to solve the “discoverability problem” of finding interesting data across many different government websites, at many different levels of government, and across the many governments in Europe.

In addition to providing access to official information about datasets from public bodies, PublicData.eu will capture (proposed) edits, annotations, comments and uploads from the broader community of public data users. In this way, PublicData.eu will harness the social aspect of working with data to create opportunities for mass collaboration. For example, a web developer might download a dataset, convert it into a new format, upload it and add a link to the new version of the dataset for others to use. From fixing broken URLs or typos in descriptions to substantive comments or supplementary documentation about using the datasets, PublicData.eu will provide up to date information for data users, by data users.

Non-technical users, including researchers, journalists, ordinary citizens, will be able to use PublicData.eu to browse data and be able to find answers to questions. This will be accomplished through providing basic data analysis and visualisation tools together with more in-depth resources for those looking to dig deeper into the data. Users will be able to personalise their data browsing experience by being able to save links and create notes and comments on datasets.

PublicData.eu is developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a UK-based non-profit
as part of the LOD2 ("Creating knowledge out of interlinked data")
project. LOD2 is an ICT research project financed under the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme.

PublicData.eu is powered by CKAN, a data
catalogue system used by various institutions and communities to manage open
data. CKAN and all its components are open source software and used by a wide
community of catalogue operators from across Europe, including the UK
Government's data.gov.uk portal.